


Caught

by Fionavar



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: A lot of moments left blank, Alternate Universe - Mermaid, D&D, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Original D&D characters - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-06-29 12:20:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19830100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fionavar/pseuds/Fionavar
Summary: Two worlds can touch, but never merge.It was never going to last.A birthday present for the wonderful Codename Cynic, with much love.





	Caught

**Author's Note:**

  * For [codenamecynic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/codenamecynic/gifts).



He runs blindly, breath sobbing in his throat and feet picking up every thorn and pebble on the narrow path that leads to the sea. A tree branch, blown lightly in the wind, brushes against his shoulders like another whiplash, and it pulls a sound from him that would be a curse if he had the breath, a plea if they’d ever made any difference at all.

He runs, bruised and bleeding feet landing hard on the burning sand. The waves will be cool, but the salt will sting in his cuts worse than the tears are stinging in his eyes and he can’t face it yet. And someone might come looking for him down here, if they feel the lash didn’t etch the lesson deep enough. He needs to hide, and there’s a place he knows, out on the sloping rocks. They won’t see him there, they’re all too big to squeeze through.

Taliesin catches his breath when he reaches it. He’s grown a bit since the last time he was down here – not too much, but he’s going to have to leave some skin on the rocks, and it doesn’t feel like there’s any left on his back this time.

“Fuck them!” he spits into the spray, and even to his ears the words are thin – no fierce, angry courage, but a shallow bravado that fools nobody. A sound drifts over the waves, enough like his name to wring another curse from his lips as he turns sideways and forces himself into a crevice even narrower than he remembers.

The sun casts harsh dazzles of light onto the seaweeds and limpets, and the roar of the breakers echoes into the little cave loud enough that it makes no sound at all when Taliesin hugs his knees to his chest and puts his face down on them to cry. He’s cold and stiff by the time he raises his head again, but a strange wonder overtakes him. 

He’s being watched.

As steady in the water as if he’s standing on solid ground, unmoved by the pulling and crashing waves, there’s… someone. Some _thing_ , maybe, because he’s upright in the water and the face doesn’t look quite right, like the pictures of ancient people in one of Jorran’s books. Taliesin is looking at his eyes, which are too-large and oddly set, and blue. Not a normal blue, but the blue of the ocean on a day when the storms roll in and the sea is trying to match tempers with the sky. They’re certain, too, as if the mind behind them knows nothing but answers.

Taliesin realises he’s holding his breath, has been since he looked up, only when he gasps for air. He startles himself with the noise, and is certain that he will have broken the moment, that there will be nothing in front of him but restless water. He is observed, still, but suddenly the face is creased into an expression he knows. The eyebrows knit, the mouth folds into a line of pain, and he lunges forward suddenly as the waves break around him.

When the water recedes again, another indrawn breath in its endless struggle to reclaim the land, Taliesin sees him curled on the rocks.

He isn’t human. The face is close, even closer when set against pain, and the slick dark hair is too. His arms might pass, carved in muscular lines as he hauls himself further up the rock and closer to Taliesin, but sharply tapered fins curve out from his elbows and his fingers are webbed. Gill-slits flutter in the sides of his neck and of his bare chest. Instead of legs, his body sweeps into the long, deadly length of a shark’s, with all of the fins that – oh.

There’s a hook, a large monstrous thing like the head of a harpoon, pierced through the merfolk’s tail. A slow rivulet of fish-pale blood leaks from it and is washed away with every passing wave. He curls his body up and around, bringing the clean-edged flukes into the reach of his webbed fingers. The blue eyes meet Taliesin’s again, but the unchanging expression says nothing in any language he knows.

Taliesin has heard of the merfolk. It was nursery tales when he was young: stolen skins and sea-witch trades and songs to bring a ship foundering on the rocks. The stories he hears now are still contradictory. There’s a treaty, he’s heard: fish driven into the nets of landsmen, warnings of brewing storms, and no child drowns in the seas around Arrabar. There’s other talk, darker: the merfolk steal fish, and any honest fisherman will kill one if they can, Gordri’s determination to snare a mergirl and see which stories are true before he butchers her and sells the tail to their prick of a father.

The hook is too big to catch any smaller prey, and a length of chain dangles from it. It isn’t sea-worn, but new, shining silver and heavy like guilt that isn’t really his. “You shouldn’t be here,” Taliesin says, and he doesn’t know whether the merfolk will understand but he has to give some sort of warning. His mind is full of the stink of the marketplace, fish guts and discarded scales rotting in the sun.

“Caught,” the merfolk says, a word that falls between them like a stone sinking through still water. He sets pointed teeth in his lips as he works at the hook, trying to ease the barbs through his tail without further injuring himself.

“Can I help?” Taliesin asks, easing forward slowly. He doesn’t want to scare off the merfolk and he’d forgotten, for those long-stretched moments, how stiff and sore he is.

“No.” The gills open and close slowly as the merfolk works over his tail.

“Oh.” Chastened, Taliesin sinks back.

The inhuman mouth still held tight, the merfolk straightens. “Foolish,” he says, his eyes raking over the cave. Taliesin feels… different, when they touch on him; smaller, measured against another scale, seen but not rejected. Not yet, and that is already very different from the way others look at him.

The merfolk nods, not at Taliesin but at a crevice in the rock. He wedges the hook in tight, bashes it further in with a rock, tugs on the chain, and nods again when he seems satisfied that it is securely held there and prevented from threatening him or his kind again. Then, suddenly, he turns his gaze back to Taliesin. The pointed teeth flash as the merfolk lunges, and Taliesin’s heart stutters in his chest – he blames him for the hook, for the hunters, it’s some sort of vengeance –

\- but instead the webbed hands have only seized his foot, and the merfolk is staring at it like he’s never seen one before. Well, maybe he hasn’t.

“Yes?” the merfolk asks, and Taliesin isn’t exactly sure what he means, but it’s okay. He can stare at feet if he wants to. His fingers are rough, not the calluses of hard work or dry skin, but the coarse, even texture of sandstone or, well. Shark skin. Tentatively, almost gently, the merfolk cups his heel in one webbed hand and touches the sole with another. “Hm,” he murmurs, drawing the tip of a finger over a shallow cut, and ‘caught,” again, as he pulls free a thorn.

People don’t touch Taliesin like that, and he shivers. The merfolk looks up at that, brow creased again as he asks, “Yes?”

“Um, yes,” he says, hoping it’s the right answer. It must be close, because the merfolk nods again before picking up Taliesin’s other foot and tending to it. It feels – all of this feels – like a moment from someone else’s life, green-glass waves and sunshine, a creature out of the deeps who is there with him, only a few small words scattered on the sea-washed rocks between them. The merfolk are drowners, he remembers, a stray thought in someone else’s voice drifting across his mind and hastily pushed away. He feels safe, here and now, and he doesn’t care if he’s wrong.

“I’m Taliesin,” he says, offering his name to the merfolk like it might mean something. “Uh. Thank you..?”

The merfolk glances up at him again, and this time – sudden and brilliant like sunlight breaking through the clouds – the flash of sharp teeth is a smile. “Yes,” the merfolk says, and then pushes himself away, down to where the bolder waves foam over the rocks.

He’s leaving, Taliesin recognises, and that means this fragile piece of time will fracture, then end. He’ll limp back to the house with his bloody back and dirty feet, and the fact that he saw a merfolk once will wear thin until it’s nothing but a tatter of memory. “What’s your name?” he asks, hoping to hold the merfolk longer with a question.

The smile widens. A wave breaks over him, and he is gone.

* * *

The storm clouds today are as dark and oppressive as Taliesin’s mood, boiling low over the horizon and the rough, choppy sea. His bare feet dig into the sand with unnecessary violence, which works brilliantly when it already gives and shifts under him. He pulls his shirt over his head, tossing it aside impatiently. The water is cold enough to freeze his balls and drive all the air from his lungs, but he wades on anyway as the waves do their best to knock him off his feet, until it’s deep enough to screw his eyes shut and dive under.

If he’s going to struggle fruitlessly, exhausting himself to no good purpose, it might as well be with the sea. Treacherous undercurrents, sharp cuts, stinging eyes, the coarse rasp and aching muscles, it’s all the same, but nobody expects the sea to care. This isn’t a fight he’s supposed to win.

Taliesin battles out through the breakers, the careless water thundering over him and driving sand into his teeth. The swell lifts him high, here; looking down at the distant beach in one breath and the wall of water past him in another, toppling over into white spume that drifts back to him. He takes a deep breath and dives, a blind and constant effort to reach the sandy bottom that ends – as it always does at high tide - with the need for air aching in his lungs and the surface drawing him back to itself.

He treads water there for a time, arms gently waving to keep him buoyant. Without the intense physical effort to distract him, thoughts he doesn’t want float up through his subconscious. Jorran, gone… good for Jorran, even if he’s mostly left alone this place is no good for him either, but… and it’s while Taliesin is trying to sink these misgivings that he sees it. A flicker in his peripheral vision, a shape cutting through the waves as though they mean nothing at all, and he turns his head to see the blunt triangular dorsal fin is coming directly for him.

He flails uselessly, panic slowing the whole process of getting his feet out behind him and his head turned for the shore, expecting at any moment to feel the shark’s teeth shear his fucking leg off or worse, and there’s no way he can outswim a shark so should he just stay still and hope it won’t notice him, no, that’s snakes, he is going to die –

\- except he regains his feet and staggers out of the surf, and when he turns, panting, to look at the waves he doesn’t see that ominous fin, but a face he has remembered for three years, steady in the water and grinning at him.

“You swim,” the merfolk says, “like a fish on a stick.”

“You scared the _fuck_ out of me!” His legs buckle in the warm rush of relief, dropping him with a graceless thud on his arse.

“Yes.”

“I thought you were a shark!”

“Yes.”

Taliesin carries on swearing and shouting at the merfolk, but it’s mostly due to some half-formed habit; neither adrenaline nor temper can carry him for long in the face of the merfolk’s calm amusement and the sheer fact that he’s _here_ and real after all.

“…and it’s not my fault I have two legs instead of a tail, I still swim better than you w– look, do you at least have a name?”

“Yes,” the merfolk says again, and honestly that does irritate a little. It’s not much of an answer, and the only full sentence he’s said was to mock Taliesin after scaring him almost to death.

“If you don’t tell me your name, I’m gonna make one up for you,” Taliesin tells him, a limping thing half a threat and half a jest.

“Call me as you will,” the merfolk says. “A drop of blood shed into the ocean, a name on the wind. I will come when I can.”

Of course, his mind instantly starts chasing all the wrong details – the old story about how to summon a selkie from the sea, and a drop of blood instead of seven tears – so he blurts out “Caught” while still trying to work out whether that means the merfolk can take off his tail and walk, if he wants, if he has reason, and it’s only when the word is repeated back to him that he realises it probably isn’t something the merfolk wants to be reminded about, and isn’t truly a name to begin with.

“It’s the first thing I ever heard you say,” Taliesin explains, feeling embarrassment heat his cheeks and ears.

It twists slightly in the merfolk’s sharp-toothed mouth as he repeats it thoughtfully, as though turning a stone over in his hands and assessing it. “Cort. Yes. I will take this name from you, Taliesin.” He lifts a webbed hand free of the churning water, gestures. “Come, Taliesin. Swim. Yes?”

He’s tired to his bones, not quite recovered his breath from the nightmare sprint for the shore, but he stands and walks again into the surf, to Cort.

* * *

Going home from Miss Molly’s doesn’t _require_ walking along the beach, but sometimes Taliesin does it anyway. The contrast between the warm rooms filled with too much noise and alcoholic fumes and the cold, restless ocean clears his head – too much, sometimes, shearing away the protective layers and leaving him too exposed to his own scrutiny.

Sometimes there is Cort, unsummoned and dangerously close to shore. The merfolk never seems to fear being seen and speared by a superstitious fisherman, for all that he had a hook through his tail when they met six years ago. Then again, Cort is so completely master of himself and his environment, it’s difficult to imagine him afraid or uncertain. Perhaps the merfolk don’t feel the same doubts and questions that plague dusty humanity. Taliesin doesn’t know. Cort has shared a handful of stories about himself and his life beneath the waves, in speech grown more fluent each time they met, but he offers each word like a pearl pried from an oyster.

He speaks of darting shoals of silver fish, chased and herded and eaten raw; of dark caves and sunken ships; of hunting sharks and the krakens who trouble the deep. He never speaks of other merfolk, and sometimes Taliesin wonders if that’s why he comes to Arrabar’s shore in answer to a stupid summons – if Cort is as lonely as he is.

But that’s a thought, like so many others, to drown in ale or a whore or the deep blue sea, whichever is most convenient at the time. Tonight the first two haven’t done the job thoroughly, so he’s here on a stretch of smooth-washed sand, watching the waves draw in gently, the stars and thin crescent moon scattering silver light over the water.

“Taliesin,” comes the call, and it takes a few minutes of dedicated searching over the dappled, shimmering surface, every wavelet casting its own shadow, to spot the one that doesn’t fit. “Swim. Yes?”

It’s not exactly a warm night, and he’s drunk enough that swimming is an objectively stupid idea, but there’s Cort, and the merfolk would never let him come to harm in the sea. Surrendering to the inevitable, Taliesin tugs off his shirt and his shoes and stumbles into the dark water. There’s a brush of rough skin against his foot and Cort surfaces behind him.

“You smell,” he says, matter-of-factly.

“So kind,” Taliesin says, concentrating on not planting his face in the ocean. “You’re not exactly fresh springtime daises yourself, you know.”

“No.”

“Remind me to show you sometime,” he mutters.

“Yes,” Cort says, as the swell lifts Taliesin off his feet. He takes that as a hint, turning to float on his back and watch the stars in the clear dark sky. The silence eases out between them for a time, companionable and flavoured with the sound of the waves. Unusually, Cort is the first to break it, and there is a note in his voice that Taliesin can’t immediately place. “Come with me, Taliesin.”

“Where?” The question is a reflex, as he rights himself again; it doesn’t really matter. He is drunk and unquiet and looking into Cort’s steady, focused gaze. He’ll go wherever, or stay. Whatever the merfolk wishes.

“In,” Cort says, the word taking on strange, unreadable weight and significance. They’ve ranged over a long stretch of Arrabar’s coastline together, and Taliesin knows that ‘in’ means the direction he would call ‘out to sea’, away from the land. That is all that he can make of the suggestion, but it’s enough to make him take a deep breath and turn his back to the beach.

He is a much stronger swimmer than when Cort first began instructing him, but in the end he is only the clumsy, inefficient descendant of those who abandoned the sea and never looked back. His feet are small and poorly shaped, his muscles shaped for gravity; even his bones set in the wrong configuration to cut through the water with the easy grace of Cort’s every movement.

“Too slow,” Cort says, the words reverberating through the water, and semi-surfaces beneath him; obediently, Taliesin lays himself along the rough skin and takes a firm hold of the dorsal fin. Cort swims deeper and speeds up once Taliesin is securely anchored, and it’s hard to tell, streamlined against his back with his eyes closed, but this might be the fastest Cort’s ever taken him. The water rushes swiftly past as Cort undulates beneath him in harsh, punishing effort. Cort knows his limits by now; he surfaces just enough for Taliesin to grab another lungful of air just often enough, and his ears ache with pressure and cold. His hands, chilled and tired after a long day’s fuck all, begin to lose their grip.

For the first time since he was ten, he remembers that the merfolk can kill.

Then Cort slows, bringing them up to the surface. He looks… wrong, somehow; Taliesin has never seen him out of breath, or uncertain, but one is in the great heaves of his chest, straining for more oxygen; the other in the way his storm-blue eyes look at him and then away.

There is no land anywhere in sight. They are completely alone, the two of them, somewhere in the silvered, heaving ocean. “Why out here?” Taliesin asks, treading water and refusing to think about the abyssal depths that lie dark and haunted beneath him, the distance between himself and the safety of land.

“I wanted,” Cort begins, and falters. “Alone. You.”

“You wanted – _oh_.” The stray edges of the thought have come to him before, like a flash of fin in murky water: _how_ and _if_ and _I wonder_ , easily suppressed, one more thing Taliesin keeps hidden and isn’t quite lying to himself about.

“Yes?” Cort’s voice is soft and tentative, the murmur of waves against a remembered shore.

There are questions, small and irrelevant things swirled out of sight on the current that surges through his veins. Gods help him, he’s never been so certain of anything in all his short mess of a life. He reaches for Cort as a drowning man reaches for a floating spar, and the merfolk pulls him in and kisses him.

Taliesin cuts himself on those pointed teeth almost instantly. It doesn’t matter, though; a well-thrown punch could do that much, and a punch would not feel like this. His hands thread into Cort’s wet hair, his chest pressed against the cool, rough solidity of Cort’s as though his heart could break free of his ribs and batter its way into him. He knows Cort, knows the effortless strength of his body, but desire changes everything.

Half dizzy, Taliesin has to break the kiss and gasp for air, kicking harder just to keep afloat. Cort has no such need, his mouth seeking out the hollow of Taliesin’s throat, his collarbone, a path underwater and down his stomach. Webbed fingers work at Taliesin’s belt; he tries to help with something that the merfolk would surely find unfamiliar, but Cort has already mastered it. He tugs, trousers sinking away and leaving Taliesin bare and aching in the dark water.

Cort surfaces, gleaming in the dim starlight. “I have you,” he tells Taliesin, and his hands rasp over Taliesin’s back and hips, lifting his legs to wrap around Cort’s waist. He doesn’t have to swim any more, only to hold tight to Cort as the merfolk reaches down to take him in careful, coarse-skinned fingers.

Cort will keep his head above water.

Later, cold and exhausted, Taliesin sits on the beach and watches Cort disappear beneath the waves. His skin feels tender as new sunburn, abraded against Cort’s, and his lip is not the only cut he’s acquired from those shark teeth. His shirt and shoes are on the sand beside him, wet and chilled with dew; his trousers are somewhere in the Sea of Fallen Stars. It might be easier to curl up in the sand naked than to try and get home to bed without anyone seeing him.

It doesn’t matter to Taliesin.

He breathes the words softly, no summoning but a truth recognised and voiced at the same moment. “I love you.”

* * *

Taliesin kicks the last pirate corpse off the side of the ship, arm held tight against his side and the shallow slice the man carved over his ribs. Around him, the crew are sluicing blood off the deck as the _Star Shark_ limps towards port. There will be all the usual attractions there, but not for Taliesin tonight; Captain Veda doesn’t leave his ship unguarded in port, and the duty roster might as well be carved in stone. Rix is quietly sympathetic and Marv just laughs at his misfortune and promises to show the boy a good time.

A sensible man would take his meal into a sheltered corner of the deck, treat his wounded side gently, chat with the others on watch, and pass as pleasant a night as possible. Instead, Taliesin paces around the deck, anxious energy crackling beneath his skin and denied an outlet. On shore he would talk too loud, drink too much, let momentum sweep him into one thing after another until he’s one more piece of flotsam washed up on the shore of the morning.

“Taliesin.”

The sound goes through him, immediate and visceral and impossible. Cort is _here_ , two years later and half the sea away from Arrabar. It doesn’t make any sense, but it doesn’t need to: Taliesin’s instantly ready to hurl himself into the dirty harbour water and into Cort’s arms, if only he could spy the merfolk beside the ship – “Cort?”

“Didja say something, Ferryman?” Padraig glances up from his place at the opposite railing.

The easy grin, like the banter, springs as readily into place as the rest of his defences. “Only to the figurehead. Her conversation’s better than yours.”

The sailor scoffs, as if to prove his point, and Taliesin looks back to the water. The exchange reorders things, reminds him that he’s only mostly the green and lonely kid who spent a summer fucking a – his mind stutters on the half-a-dozen names sailors use for the merfolk, none of which are kind or possible to reconcile with what Cort has always been to him.

“Taliesin.” Again, Cort’s voice wraps itself around his heart and pulls. Taliesin finds him in the water, a dark head and broad shoulders steady in the water, a webbed hand pushing away a floating mess of food scraps. Details are difficult to see in the dark, but light gleams from his teeth. “Come.”

He wants to, the sight of the merfolk like breaking the surface and the first greedy gulp of air, but stands still. A thousand thoughts swirl and eddy. His shipmates will come running if he goes overboard – they’ll see Cort – there’s a harpoon – he has a duty here – they won’t understand – they’ll hear him answer – they’ll jump to all the wrong conclusions – all the _right_ conclusions –

“Taliesin?”

“Tomorrow!” he calls down, as loudly as he dares. “Go!”

Cort stares at him a moment longer, then dives. Only the tip of his tail is briefly visible as Padraig joins Taliesin at the railing, but that’s enough for a sharp-eyed sailor. Padraig spits over the side, adding one more bit of water between his ship and something unlucky. “Fucking sharks.”

“Yeah,” Taliesin says, buffeted by relief and his own hypocrisy and trying not to drown in either.

“Sing out if it comes back,” Padraig says, clapping him companionably on the shoulder. “We’ll have a go with the iron. Gotta be someone in that shitheap who’d pay for a carcass.”

“Yeah,” he repeats dully. “You watch for it, your eyes are better than mine, I’ve got to –“ he trails off, but it doesn’t really matter. Padraig’s eyes are fixed on the water with a hunter’s focus; if Cort shows so much as a fluke around the ship tonight, he’ll be skewered.

But he won’t. Cort’s wiser than that. Taliesin watches the water, watches the others, and wraps that reassurance around him. It’s about as useful as a blanket made of spiderweb, but it’s what he has, and although it’s grown cold with dew by morning, it lasts. Instead of falling into a bed as soon as he’s released from the _Star Shark_ , Taliesin heads off along the waterline, looking for somewhere isolated enough to meet Cort safely.

The cove he finds is small and weedy. He’s never liked the stringy and slightly slimy touch of it under his feet and clinging to his shins as he wades out, but he gives it about as much thought as the colour of a sail on the other side of the ocean. “Cort,” Taliesin calls, offering the name for the onshore wind to blow back in his face. A drop of blood falls from his finger, spreading and dissipating in the water.

There’s a wait, like every time he’s done this, long enough for him to feel stupid about standing waist-deep in water with a cut on his hand yelling a made-up name, and then to shade into fear. What if something’s happened to Cort? What if this is the time he realises that Taliesin is not worth the trouble?

Now, as each time before, fear gives way in turn to relief and a heady anticipation that fizzes warmth through his veins when he sees the fin curving through the water. Cort is here, somehow _here_ , and that is everything. Taliesin throws himself through the wavelets with a speed that owes more to eagerness than to Cort’s careful teaching.

Laughter bubbles up around the edges of Cort’s voice as his arms surround Taliesin. “You swim-“

“-like a fish on a stick, I know,” Taliesin interrupts, hands sliding over the familiar contours of Cort’s broad shoulders, leaning in to kiss him. “And you still taste like one. What are you doing here?”

“You summoned me,” Cort says, and “I missed you”, two truths given separately.

He hadn’t. They are so far from Arrabar: he would never have thought a name and a drop of blood could reach so far, wouldn’t have presumed to call Cort across so many miles of water if he’d known, would never have put Cort at risk from his shipmates. He stumbles through something that approximates an explanation, and Cort listens gravely.

“I’ll always hear you,” he says eventually. “I will always know your blood in the water. I may not always come.”

“Well.” Taliesin hides something unexpectedly raw behind a brittle laugh, looking away from the ocean reflected in Cort’s eyes. “That’s more than I deserve. I just… wasn’t expecting you.”

Cort looses him, drifts backward with that look Taliesin’s seen sporadically ever since they first met, as though the merfolk is assessing him against some unfamiliar scale. It’s been years, though, even before a summer two years ago, and this time it feels as though Taliesin may be found wanting. “Am I unwelcome?”

“Never,” he says, and that’s true, it’s just… complicated. “Let me welcome you properly.”

When the horizon swallows up the land, Taliesin can almost convince himself that the awkwardness has been swept away and that all is as it was before they parted. He doesn’t know if he’s convinced Cort.

The sunlight thickens and heats into afternoon, and eventually Taliesin finds his way to a tavern. Marv and Rix would have been expecting him to show up there once he was off-duty; he hopes they haven’t woken up yet. Faintly giddy, exhaustion leaching colour from the corners of his vision, he wants nothing more demanding than a motionless bed to pass out in. He finds, instead, a note from Captain Veda summoning him back to the ship at his earliest convenience.

This could herald anything from the merely unpleasant to the catastrophic - extra duties, news from Arrabar. For a moment, Taliesin lets himself toy with the idea of pretending he hasn’t received the missive. He could go upstairs and sleep, and if the problem won’t disappear overnight, he might be better equipped to face it. It’s a fleeting temptation: he knows it won’t be that simple, whatever it is, and dragging his feet never really changes anything except how much mud he picks up along the way.

He dallies long enough to wash the salt from his face and to pour an ale down his throat in four long gulps, as much for a small sense of defiance as for the dwarven courage. For all that he’s too tired for anything as energetic as worry, there’s something cold at the bottom of his stomach.

Captain Veda is leaning on the railing at the stern, the light breeze teasing the inevitable cloud of smoke into threads and tatters. He nods when he sees Taliesin board, rather more to himself than as an acknowledgement.

“You wanted to see me, sir,” Taliesin says.

Captain Veda studies him for a long moment. “How was the watch?”

It’s the sort of question that sailors ask each other at the change of shift, not something the captain recalls you from shore leave to ask. There’s more beneath it, like the surface of the ocean, and either you dive in or you wait until the tsunami shows you. “There was a shark,” Taliesin offers. “Apart from th-“

“There was not,” Captain Veda says, the words as sharp and final as a drawn blade. “You spoke to it. You haven’t slept, there’s a fresh cut on your hand, your hair’s still wet, and you’re as rashed as a bride’s thighs. Want to try again?”

Taliesin commands quick, silvered words and sweetened lies. They dance easily from his tongue, deflecting awkward questions and protecting where he’s vulnerable. Usually. He doesn’t want to lie to the captain and it’d be useless to try, but the truth could be dangerous, and not only for him. He dangles like a fish on the hook of Veda’s level gaze.

The captain sighs. “You’re not the first the sea-lords have snared, lad.”

“It’s not… he’s not like that.”

“Heard that before. More than once.” Veda seats himself slowly, like an old man who’s unsure of his joints. “They’re beautiful enough, and they can be kind if it suits them. But they’ll kill a sailor sure as bad weather if they’re hungry or bored.”

Taliesin has heard all this before, the same tired old tales his shipmates tell and curse over. It doesn’t sound any more true from Veda now, especially when he can still feel Cort’s touch on him.

Cort, who has come such a long way to find him.

“I called her Moray,” Veda says, rubbing the side of his neck. He is almost looking at Taliesin, but his eyes reach past, so clearly fastened on a memory that Taliesin can almost see its long silhouette reflected in them. “And I loved her like the sea itself. Then she called me in the middle of a storm and I dived off the ship to join her, like any young fool. She’d have torn my throat out if the mate hadn’t harpooned her first.”

“Sir…” He doesn’t know what to say. Old heartache bleeds through the words, and he respects this man like few others. He doesn’t doubt him, but his mind niggles at the story like a tongue prodding at a loose tooth. He sees it for a moment, Cort calling to him from the storm-tossed waves, teeth bared, blood on the water, and for that instant the pieces fit. Then they fracture, splintering like glass.

The distance fades from Veda’s eyes, and he sighs again. “I’d be glad to think you could learn from a bad example, Taliesin, but I’ve seen too many like you. A handful survive themselves. So.” Veda stands again, solid and weathered as the mainmast, a part of the ship that just happens to be flesh instead of wood. He is, Taliesin sees, entirely the captain again. “While you’re aboard the ship, you don’t summon him. I won’t tell the men what you’ve been up to, and if you’re wise you won’t let them find out. If he’s seen, he’ll be speared. With any luck, you’ll live to be grateful. If not, I’ll have one hell of a mess to explain to your father.” Captain Veda shakes his head slowly. “Run along, lad. Enjoy your shore leave, and stay on land if you can. Find a pair of legs to lose yourself between and forget him.”

It’s not his business, and he should curb his tongue, but that reckless, impulsive urge to pull at the thread and stick his fingers into the wound brings the words out. “Did that ever work for you?”

Veda is still, his eyes shadowed. “No.”

* * *

Pain hammers at the forgiving darkness until it cracks, and the conqueror rushes triumphantly into his body to take full possession. It brings light with it, a red wash through closed eyelids and a shard of white under them. Every separate breath is another stab from a broken rib, but he’s alive.

It’s unexpected, and not entirely welcome, like someone put a plateful of food in front of him in a tavern and is standing over him with a stern expression. _No thanks, I didn’t order this and I’ve already eaten. Besides, I think the chef overdid the pain –_ the thought strikes him as laughable without being in the least funny, a tired drunkard’s giggle almost surfacing before his stomach protests the effort. His bruises have begotten bruises of their own, some of which have started fraternising with cuts and others have eloped with breaks, turning him into one giant breeding colony of injuries, and he’d wish that they would take their weird little incestuous orgy somewhere else, except –

\- well. Except that he deserves this.

Memory and guilt spear into his pain-fogged mind like a two-pronged harpoon lancing through the water.

What he did.

The night collapsing around him, thoughts shredded by knives and their fragments washed away in blood.

Everything he’s done. A distant port, the _Star Shark_ , his brothers and his father.

_Cort._

Taliesin forces open his eyes, starts to sit up as a man traverses an unfamiliar marsh – each step taken slowly and so many of them false, steps to be revoked immediately lest he sink past recovery. Fresh waves of agony break over him with every slow movement: the wild breakers of a spring tide, carelessly shoving him off his feet, pulling him under, dragging him this way and that, leaving him gasping for air when he finally surfaces in the instant before the next one crashes over his head. More than once he thinks about drowning. They say it’s an easy death, although how the fuck would anyone know?

Eventually he sees the rocks of the familiar cove around him, blurred through tears born of pain of one kind or another, there’s no shortage of possible causes and no will at all to sort through them. The tide’s low, and he’s above the high water line; enough sand stretches between Taliesin and the gently-lapping wavelets for him to see the trail, and he doesn’t need to think to interpret it. He was pulled from the water by something – someone – with one hand and a long tail to spare for the effort, who left him in the relative safety of the dry sand and returned to the sea.

Cort left him.

The name cracks from his bloody lips, drags him half-stumbling and half-crawling toward the water. The sand scrapes into raw wounds and honestly it’d hurt less to plunge himself into fire than into seawater, but it doesn’t matter, nothing else matters. There’s blood aplenty in the water now and he calls again, howling the name to an empty sky and a sea that stretches flat to the horizon.

The tide comes in. The light dies.

* * *

He returns to the shore. The first tide washed the sand clean of his blood, and the beach looks exactly as it did every day of a long year, as it will a year from now. The sea has no memory, no scars. Not like him: the body is too stubborn to leave itself torn open, but that would be easier to live with.

His throat is closed tight about a name he’s not worthy to speak and a call that will not be answered.

Harper closes his eyes, turns his back on the ocean, begins to walk inland.

Deep below the wind-ruffled waves, his heart is held in rough, webbed hands.


End file.
